u/Significant_Emu_9195

I've been trying to find a good mobile viewer to show designs on my phone or a tablet. I run iOS so hopefully others have tried some of the apps and can make a recommendation. Any help is greatly appreciated.

I’m sure most people here might already know about some of the Open Source tools that work well with FreeCAD. If not take a look at a YouTube video I did that talks about all 10 I use for design related work. They are some of the most common ones, but who knows maybe some people aren’t aware of the integrations that exist. Hopefully it helps at least a few that are newer to FreeCAD and want to fully utilize their models. If it’s a repeat or not useful, feel free to remove the post. As always a HUGE thank you to the FreeCAD team for the contribution. I left one of the other CAD packages and haven’t looked back. Especially after I found the paths to leverage the models built in other apps or use other apps to drive FreeCAD models.

Hey r/GoRVing, first time posting. A problem I keep thinking about and I want the collective experience here on.

The problem

Anything that monitors an RV in real time, batteries, tanks, solar, GPS, climate, security cameras for when you leave the rig at the campsite, etc., needs an always-on data connection if you want to see it from your phone. The catch is that "always on" historically means burning cellular data fast enough that one of three things happens:

1. You hit the hotspot cap mid-month and the carrier cuts your data until next billing cycle. The rig goes dark right when you most want to know what's happening.
2. You end up paying for a second SIM or a separate "IoT" plan just for the rig.
3. You give up and only check things when you're physically there, which defeats most of the point of monitoring at all.

The question

If you wanted to monitor your RV 24/7, no sleep mode, parked or driving, in storage or on a trip, how would you actually solve the data side?

Specific things I'd love to hear about:

• Are you running a separate cellular line for monitoring, or sharing with your normal hotspot or phone plan?
• What carrier and plan have you found works for this?
• What kind of monthly data footprint does your monitoring setup actually use? Anyone tracking it?
• Do you leave it running while the rig is in storage, or turn it off?
• For anyone who's tried it, does only sending updates when values change (vs. streaming continuously) actually move the needle, or is the savings too small to matter?

Why I'm asking

I've been working on this problem for a while and recently got the data usage on our setup down to about 14 MB/day, projecting to ~430 MB/month, running 24/7 with no sleep mode and no parked-vs-driving difference. That surprised me, because a year ago I would have guessed the answer was 5x that. Curious whether other folks here are seeing similar numbers, way better, way worse, or whether most people just live with the cap-out problem because there isn't a clean answer.

This all assumes others are running some kind of tech in their RV that does monitor. So I'd love to hear how many of you do run this level of tech in your RV and how many are trying to stay offline while traveling / camping. One of the biggest ones for me was tracking solar while the vehicle is in storage. Having visibility to the battery SOC before I go pick it up saves me anxiety.

Genuinely want to learn from what works and what doesn't out in the wild. Thanks for reading.